Thursday, October 6, 2016

Spring is here, and our grasslands are full of the new season’s flowers, like this fragrant little bulbine lily.

This plant can be expected to keep producing more flower-spikes like this one, through to late summer.

Each individual flower lasts only one day, but new flowers keep opening, up the spike, so each flower-spike is decorative for quite some time.

Notice those lovely shaggy stamens!

Despite its name, this perennial plant doesn’t actually have a bulb. It does, however, have a corm, with very fat, succulent roots attached to it.

The root at left is of a rather young plant, dug up in December. That little corm has a way to grow before it reashes full size. (Click on the photo for a closer look at it.) However the roots have already stored up a good supply of the starch which is to see the plant through winter.

Bulbine bulbosa is “deciduous”, which means that its above-ground parts die
down when flowering and seed production finish, and the plant then
remains dormant until the following spring. The business-like root is
the secret of its long life, letting it survive droughts, fire, and
frosts.

Its leaves also work to help it make the best of the sparse rainfall of its natural habitat. They are channelled on the upper surface, a design which
leads the rain into the centre of
the plant, where it gives the roots more water than the surrounding soil.

The leaves are hollow, rather like slender onion leaves, and the plants have been called "wild onion". (Don’t
eat those leaves, though. They are likely to give you a severe case of
diarrhoea!) The sweet, nutritious corms were one of the favourite summer foods of the Aborigines, and are said to be the best flavoured of the lily roots. They fatten up throughout the growing season, and are best dug up at the end of the flowering season. They must be roasted, to make them safe to eat.
Like so many of our Australian plants, common bulbine is more popular in gardens overseas than here, which is a pity. For garden use, the best position for it would be in a garden of perennials where it can pop up again year after year.
It is a colony-forming plant in the wild, and a good colony can be quite spectacular. In gardens, the same effect can be achieved by planting bulbines in groups.
Despite their natural drought hardiness, they looks best if given some supplementary watering during the growing and flowering season.

Annual BulbineBulbine alataThis is the taller of our two local bulbines. The flowers are very similar to the above, but the leaves look as though they are coated with blue-grey powder. It behaves as an annual in the wild, but well-cared-for, in a garden situation, it can be a clumping perennial. New plants can be grown from the tiny winged seeds, which should be stored for several months before planting. They are likely to take a month or two to germinate.This species is found naturally in the Jondaryan area and further west, and is the best bulbine for heavy clay soil.

A site about plants indigenous to the basalt soils of inland south-east Queensland, and suitable for use in gardens. The area it covers is roughly bounded by the Great Dividing Range, the Condamine River, the New South Wales border and the Bunya Mountains.TO SEARCH THIS SITENote the little white search box on the top left hand side of the site. Type your search item there and press ENTER

Author’s Note:This blogsite is a follow-up to my book, "Toowoomba Plants. Vol 1: Trees and Shrubs", published in September 2005 and now out of print. Look for a revised edition of it in 2016.“Vol 2" is in the pipeline. It will be about other local native plants (i.e. not the trees and shrubs).Meanwhile I want to use this medium to:• make further information about our local plants available to interested people.• report on local news, and discuss local issues about local plants.

Comments PleaseIf you've found an article interesting, please do comment. I will value your feedback, questions, corrections and further information - and I'm sure that other readers would appreciate hearing more points of view than those which come from me. NOTE: Your comments to not appear on the site until I've had time to approve them for publication, so don't worry if what you wrote seems to have disappeared into limbo. It will get there. I try to respond wherever a response is called for, so do check back later.

Contact Me:Please email me if you have suggestions for other articles for the blogsite, or if you wish to be notified when my new books are available.Patricia GardnerEmail: toowoombaANTI SPAMplants@gmail.com(obviously you should remove the anti spam letters before use)